The Dante Club

Rating:
Summary: An Invaluable Book
Review: I enjoyed this book tremendously. I only wish I had been able to read it when taking American Literature in high school. It brings to life the authors and a time which can seem extremely remote and irrelevant to a bored 15-year-old.

Now I'm reading it all again with a fresh look and a more mature perspective. I do look forward to Mr. Pearl's next book.



Rating:
Summary: Dante meets Longfellow in the after Civil War jungle
Review: A phenomenal book, indeed. 1865. Just after thE Civil War. The author starts from a real fact : the first American translation of Dante's Divine Comedy by Longfellow in Cambridge next to Boston. The history of this translation and the meaning of the Inferno of the Divine Comedy are perfect, though debatable. It is too close to Dante's biography to really reach the mythological level that Blake had reached a lot better in his illustrations of the English translation of the beginning of the 19th century. But that is not the main interest of the book. Then the author builds a full plot against this book, this translation from the various fundamentalist protestants who see in the book a work of the popish, papal, romish devil and try to stop it with arguments we still know perfectly : the influence on the students, and the general public, might be disturbing and dangerous, might lead them to sinning and even criminal ideas or even activities. Yet that is not the main interest of the book. The main interest is the criminal plot that develops around all that from a frustrated and deranged Civil War veteran who identifies his war sufferings to Dante's description of Hell and finds a mission in himself, that of cleaning up Boston of all the sinners who caused the war and menace Dante's translation. We then have a series of crimes that are set up as infernal punishments in the shape of what Dante describes in his poem. The details are of course not to be revealed. But the book reveals the deep hypocrisy of a society that has reached a point where the whole world is going to change. You have those who resist that change and become fundamentalists of a certain puritan conception of protestantism. You have those who seize the change to make a fortune, or to increase the fortune they have made during the war. And then you have those who navigate between the two poles and play the perfect role of the hypocrites who flatter both sides to go on speculating and even embezzling without being questioned by either side. But then you have a smaller group of intellectuals who are looking for a deeper and wider humanistic perspective and could reject both extremes for a reasonable attitude, particularly concerning the veterans who have to be helped out of their misery, rejected as they are by all sides and forced to integrate this moving and ambiguous society by swallowing down and sponging away their suffering and their trauma. Unluckily, these intellectuals are unable to do anything but their intellectual work and venture because they have never known misery, poverty, suffering and they are totally locked up in their comfortable wealthy and protected situation. In one word they are egotistic and since they are poets they end up being vain in the glory they have conquered with their poetry. In other words they are not able to change the world neither for the worse nor for the better. In a word they are pathetic in their sense of justice that only aims at stopping the criminal mind who is killing people to make their own position safer, or just plain safe. The book here becomes even ironical since the model that the criminal is going to use to assassinate people will be unknowingly provided by one of these intellectuals who will, out of his good heart, preach Dante as a cathartic entertainment and enlightenment to the veterans. When we close the book after reading the last page we just wonder if there is a higher meaning, if we have reached in any way the higher meaning that Dante brings to us with his poems, and I must say I think we haven't. It is a great thriller, though a little bit slow because of its intellectualism, but it does not lead to a reflection on society, human cruelty, war, or anything really. I wonder what William Blake would have thought of this use of the Divine Comedy as the basis of a thriller, he who thought Dante was a creator of a complete Christian mythology.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU



Rating:
Summary: I really wanted to like this but....
Review: I did want to like this book, however it had so many flaws. I did finish it, but how anti-climactic. First of all, the geography of Boston did not make sense; even today it takes awhile to walk from Beacon Hill to Cambridge, and the characters in the book would make it happen within several paragraphs (walking or on horseback). There were so many mistakes concerning the Civil War I lost count. Of course no one guessed the murderer, because he was such a minor character until his unveiling. I did not find the characters believable nor the language convincing for this time period. A much better effort in that regard are the books by David Liss; A Conspiracy of Paper and a Spectacle of Corruption about 18th Century London. The language is beautiful and much more authentic than that used here by this author. The premise was clever, and had it been handled better, it would have held together, but the characters were so woodenly drawn that I found myself not really caring what happened to them. The best of these was Oliver Wendell Holmes. The author did a much better job with him than with the others who were so one dimentional. But it was not enough to give this book a good review. And the additon of a "reader's guide" seems to be a publisher's ruse to make us think that this is more literature than murder mystery. NOT SO. An avid reader of all genres

Rating:
Summary: Pretentious Crap
Review: What Mr. Pearl does not know about the Civil War could fill many more books than the length of this book. He says he models his murderer on the 10th and 13th Massachusetts regiments; I am very familiar with both histories and can say that Mr. Pearl is way out of line. Pearl's murderer is driven by his fellow Union soldiers raping black women, killing Rebel prisoners, and dispatching "deserters" without trial. Oh! the wickness of Mr. Pearl's war. War is Hell without making fiction of it. Then the poor murderer/post-traumatic stress disorder victim returns to Boston, quickly assumes a new identity, discovers his life's purpose in bloodily protecting Dante, and becomes a serial killer who terrorizes Boston. Only the Dante club can stop him. But wait! there's a twist.

When I was through with this book I wanted to throw it through my wall in a fit of anger at the historical bloopers that Mr. Pearl incorporates, but I fould that the vapidness of the text had robbed me of my strength.

In the words of Metternich, not Dante: "Alles hat eine Ende, die Wurst hat Zwei."

Rating:
Summary: Reach far exceeds grasp
Review: I hated this book.

I wanted to love it, but the author's obsequiousness continued to put me off.

Repeated mis-use of syntax; placing unbelievable 1990's words and phrasing in the mouths of major, literary characters from the mid-1800's; poor pacing and transition in the first two-thirds of the novel -- all created a framework of high annoyance, and not delight.

In truth, the concept for this work was terrific. The author should get high marks for it. His EDITOR, however, should be fired, and banned from any future editorial employment.

A much better attempt at this genre was The Alienist, by the accomplished Caleb Carr. Carr created an utterly believable world. Pearl's world is, by comparison, populated by video game characters, stilted and stiff, always a long run away from credibility.

Rating:
Summary: A great read with outstanding characters
Review: This novel intertwines fiction with history so well that the fiction becomes a history.

I am most fascinated by the levels of characters.
The actual Dante Club members and close associates are revealed as though I know them; people that they know or have previously met are revealed only to that extent; and strangers are only revealed by physical characteristics and perceived emotions. This is how real people know and meet real people, but Mr. Pearl found a way to describe these interactions in distinct tiers. I can only describe the style as "impressionism in character definition". Being that Monet is my favorite artist; I think Matthew Pearl is in good company.

If you haven't read this book, do so immediately!

Rating:
Summary: Gripping and suspenseful to the very end!
Review: I simply devoured this book! I didn't guess the murderer
until it was revealed and I felt just as Holmes did, when I found out. This was just the incentive I needed to read Dante's Divine Comedy. I only dabbled in literature until reading this book.

I think I know why it was eventually called the Divine Comedy: it's divine intervention that inspired Dante to write such a poem and its comical that he had the imagination to categorize sins so carefully as to determine such outlandish punishments for each one. I wonder who Dante would see in Hell if he were to take that same journey today.